The question of functionality is just my point. One can produce a system that is functional, while at the same time lacking intelligence, thwarting of potential value, unless you claim that functionality is synonymous with intelligence and value inflation? — JerseyFlight

The brand of hierarchy theory I am talking about is the one that comes out of theoretical biology. So it is the modern science-based view of self organisation in nature. But it also reflects the long tradition of organicism and dialectics in metaphysical thought. As such, it embraces finality as a fundamental cause - one half of the dialectic which is final cause and efficient cause (or alternatively, formal cause and material cause).

Thus functionality is a general way to talk about final cause. And this finality can be just a "dumb" material tendency - the kind of brute physical goal encoded in the Laws of Thermodynamics. Or it could be the "intelligent" desires of some human community.

Hierarchy theory is broad enough to span the full gamut of natural teleology. And it in fact constructs its hierarchy on the emergence of grades of telos - physics at the bottom, human psychology at the top.

So your remarks don't feel accurately target. You already have some distorted impression about hierarchical organisation. And that leads you to seek some wedge complaint like "functional doesn't necessarily mean intelligent".

But hierarchy theory already deals with that. Functionality is Nature self-organising in ways that permit it to actually exist - as a persisting flow or process. It is simply an expression of the evolutionary principle.

That is neither "dumb" nor "intelligent". It is simply the logic of nature. To want to paint it as dumb or intelligent is to believe nature must meet some human standard of behaviour. Or worse yet, the standard of some divine intellect.

I see that you are calling it "natural," but my point is that if true, 1) this wouldn't automatically make it a form of intelligence and 2) this notion of natural order could be used to justify a system of hierarchy, that though functional, would ultimately lead to the negation of value. — JerseyFlight

It "automatically" subsumes any notion of what counts as being intelligent or valuable.

You are applying the perspective of transcendent idealism. You speak of intelligence and value as if they are Platonic finalities. That leads you to complain about the huge potential for the real world to be imperfect when held up against the shining example of the thoughts in the mind of some divine intellect.

The whole point of hierarchy theory - as an expression of natural philosophy - is to instead accept that the world creates itself through its own emergent self-organising logic. Nature is rationally structured because that is what works. So no need for creating gods. This is a metaphysics of immanent bootstrapping.

You are talking about hierarchies being a choice. And as humans, we do think we can design our own social systems. But how much freedom do we really have on that score?

I think your comments reflect the unrealistic expectations people build up because they don't look close enough at actual human society and fail to appreciate the telos it ends up pursuing.

Why are we so "dysfunctionally" burning fossil fuel and living it large as a species of consumers? Well, hierarchy theory tells us that natural systems are naturally focused on just that mission of maximising entropy production.

And if you look far enough into the future and discover you don't like where that leads, then you need to "intelligently" turn the ship around.

Either that or civilisation collapses.

And what of it, in Nature's eyes? Another failed species to add the long list. Or maybe even a successful species that popped up to liberate a geologically trapped store of entropy in a sudden exponential burst, then departed the scene, job well done.

To start saying Nature has to choose - either decide to be smart of dumb - is to lapse back into transcendental idealism. It is pretending that the human mind in all its proven short-sightedness is somehow also the divine ideal informing metaphysical existence.

At best, humans are a particular complex expression of Nature. And hierarchy theory gives us the dialectical logic of how Nature could immanently self-organise its way into such a state of complexity.

As I see it Hierarchy Theory would not specifically mean the conclusion of Democracy. — JerseyFlight

As you see it? If you knew something about hierarchy theory, then your opinions might carry more weight.

I gave you a simple example of the organisation of an army. If you can think of a better alternative functional structure, than present that.

Which is the more intelligent and effective fighting force, the Greek citizen-soldier hoplite or some barbarian horde?

As I understand it, we are talking about the successful arrangement of complex information? — JerseyFlight

What I am talking about is the natural logic of hierarchical organisation. It is the obvious way that Nature is going to arrange itself to achieve any function or finality.

Human social order is just one tiny example.

Tyranny could possibly look like a hierarchy systems model that organizes society in such a way that it ends up negating value. — JerseyFlight

Right. So the theory says top down constraints and bottom up construction must be opposed forces in balance. And guess what? Humans figured out that democracy was a good idea because it could balance those two aspects of social organisation - local scale competition and global scale cooperation.

From the functional view of hierarchical organisation we can of course also diagnose the dysfunctional.

[

If you are talking about mimicking patterns you claim to find in Nature, I would need more than just the fact that you believe you found a pattern, and therefore it automatically becomes normative, designated a form of intelligence. — JerseyFlight

What you believe is neither here nor there.

I'm fairly confident that both the input/output and output/input viewpoints are equally accurate and correct. — Malcolm Lett

But only one of them theorises that the brain predicts its inputs. And that view also happens to accord with the facts.

This is Friston’s now classic paper on the principles - https://www.uab.edu/medicine/cinl/images/KFriston_FreeEnergy_BrainTheory.pdf

What's your stance on the hard problem of phenomenal experience? If I'm understanding you correctly, you're suggesting an explanation that is just as materialist as my own (ie: no metaphysical). So it should suffer the same hard problem. — Malcolm Lett

My answer on that is if you understand how the brain works - how it is in an embodied modelling relation with the world - then the hard problem becomes how it wouldn’t feel like something to be modelling the world in that fashion.

A hard problem remains when you get down to questions of why red looks red in precisely the way it does. That is a hard problem to the degree you have no counterfactual to drive a causal explanation. Red is always red and not something else, so it is not accessible to a theory that says change x and you will instead see that red is y.

But if the brain is living a modelling relation with the world, then that claim involves a ton of counterfactuals.

For example, it explains why we can become depersonalise in the sensory deprivation conditions of a flotation tank. Or even in the brainstem-gated state of sleep.

Take away a flow of real world stimulus and our brain no longer has that world to push against - to out guess in terms of predicting the next sensory input state. With nothing to get organise against, a clear sense of self also evaporates. You can’t feel yourself pushing against the world if the world ain’t pushing back. And so there is no relationship being formed, and no self being constructed as the “other” to the world.

You suggested in another post that a "triadic" model somehow avoids both the hard problem and the need to resort to metaphysics, but it isn't clear to me how that works. — Malcolm Lett

Semiosis is the triadic story. Systems or hierarchical organisation are triadic stories. A modelling relation is a triadic story.

It is a general architecture for explaining biological complexity. You have the three things of the neuronal model, the dynamical world is aiming to regulate, and that relationship actually happening.

I just wanted to say that I really appreciate your comments. I always find new avenues for learning that come from them. — Malcolm Lett

That’s great. It’s not an easy subject. And you can find every kind of viewpoint being marketed.

Surely you admit this is not a straight-forward or uncontroversial process? — JerseyFlight

Usual evolutionary logic applies. If it works, it will survive.

What concerns me is a kind of instrumental tyranny. How does the system avoid this? — JerseyFlight

What would that tyranny look like? How often would it occur in Nature where hierarchy theory is all about self organising systems?

The question I have for hierarchy theorists is how the structuring of such a system avoids the arbitrary negation or deprivation of potentially valuable parts that have been deemed at a lower level of value? — JerseyFlight

It would seem that this logically follows from the conclusion that structures can only be as strong as the quality of their individual parts/ at the same time there is a dialectic here, the individual parts receive their quality from the nature of the whole. — JerseyFlight

That's how hierarchy theory works. It is about the dialectical interaction between parts and wholes. And the two have to complement each other for the structure to persist.

So the whole - the global scale of the system - has to provide the constraints that shapes the right kind of parts. And the parts have to have the right kind of shape to meet the goals of the whole. The parts, in all their freedom, have to be acting in ways that re-construct that whole, in other words.

Think about an army. You need soldiers that act like soldiers and generals that act like generals.

That is the soldiers need to be good at acting on the ground in ways that produce a functional army. They must have the right habits to deal with the here and now of any combat situation.

Then the generals in their field headquarters need to be good at acting in ways that also produce a functional army. They must make the broad command decisions that shape the local combat situations as they will likely pop up during battle.

The hierarchical organisation works because it has a global view which gives shape to the local action. And the local action has enough of a view - enough of its own creative freedom - that on average it produces the kind of result which keeps the army rolling.

The notion of a hierarchy has gathered a lot of negative connotations. No one wants to get told what to do. No one wants to be on the bottom rung of anything.

But if you want a system that is intelligently adaptive, then it needs to have this kind of organisation. It needs to be able to apply its intelligence over multiple scales of being, multiple spatiotemporal horizons of action.

If the balance between the local and global scales are right, then the right outcomes will result. The local scale will continue to construct the whole, and the whole will continue to give coherent form its own parts. The system will survive and function, locked into a dynamic of mutual benefit.

And part of the dynamic is that there is internal mobility. Privates can get made generals. Generals can get busted to privates.

Or at least this is part of the democratic ideal we instinctively understand as being a smart way to operate.

1. The computational approach appears to have the greatest explanatory power of the various alternatives out there. — Malcolm Lett

Reading more bits in detail, my criticism remains. Even as a computational approach, it is the wrong computational approach.

You are thinking of the brain as something that takes sensory input, crunches that data and then outputs a "state model" - a conscious representation.

So a simple input/output story that results in a "Cartesian theatre" where awareness involves a display. But then a display witnessed by who?

And an input/output story that gives this state model top billing as "the place where all data would want to be" as that is the only place it gets properly appreciated and experienced.

But biology-inspired computation - the kind that Stephen Grossberg in particular pioneered - flips this around. The brain is instead an input-filtering device. It is set up to predict its inputs with the intent of being able to ignore as much of the world as it can. So the goal is to be able to handle all the challenges the world can throw at it in an automatic, unthinking and involuntary fashion. When that fails, then attentional responses have to kick in and do their best.

So it is an output/input story. And a whole brain story.

The challenge in every moment is to already know what is going to happen and so have a plan already happening. The self is then felt as that kind of prepared stability. We know we are going to push the door open and exactly how that is going to feel. We feel that embodied state of being.

And then the door turns out to be covered in slime, made of super-heavy lead, or its a projected hologram. In that moment, we won't know what the fuck is going on - briefly. The world is suddenly all wrong and we are all weird. Then attention gets to work and hopefully clicks thing back into place - generating a fresh state of sensorimotor predictions that now do mesh with the world (and with our selves as beings in that world).

But this attentional level awareness is not "consciousness" clicking in. It is just the catch-up, the whole brain state update, required by a failure to proceed through the door in the smooth habitual way we had already built as our own body image.

Consciousness is founded on all the things we don't expect to trouble us in the next moment as much as the discovery that there is almost always something that is unexpected, novel, significant, etc, within what we had generally anticipated.

That is why I say it is holistic. What you managed to ignore or deal with without examination - which is pretty much everything most of the time - is the iceberg of the story. It is the context within which the unexpected can be further dealt to.

As I say, this is a well developed field of computational science now - forward modelling or generative neural networks. So even if you want to be computational, you haven't focused on the actually relevant area of computer science - the one that founded itself on claims of greater biological realism.

furthermore it offers predictions about what we'll discover as neuroscience develops. It provides explicit mechanisms behind why we are aware of certain things, and not aware of others. — Malcolm Lett

Errm, no. You would have to show why you are offering a sharper account than that offered by a Bayesian Brain model of attentional processing for instance.

2. I have not seen a non-computational theory provide this level of detail. — Malcolm Lett

And you've looked?

Besides....

We appear to perceive certain external and internal senses and data sources, while not perceiving others. For example, we don't have direct access to arbitrary long term memories and it seems quite reasonable to assume that access to long term memory requires some sort of background lookup

....is an example of the sketchiness of any "level of detail".

Basic "psychology of memory" would ask questions like are we talking about recognition or recollection here? I could go on for hours about the number of wrong directions this paragraph is already headed in from a neurobiological point of view.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that a computational theory of the brain and consciousness has the best ability to "model" the observed behaviours (internal and external), enabling us to do useful things with that modelling capability; however it may not form a "complete" theory. — Malcolm Lett

Sure. But I've seen countless cogsci flow chart stories of this kind - back in the 1980s, before thankfully folk returned to biological realism.

That statement assumes that semiosis only applies to language. — Malcolm Lett

I said language was a "new level" of semiosis. So I definitely was making the point that life itself is rooted in semiosis - biosemiosis - and mind, in turn, is rooted in neurosemiosis, with human speech as yet a further refinement of all this semiotic regulation of the physical world.

I would suggest that the mechanisms I have proposed are another example of semiotics. I probably haven't got the split quite right, but as an attempt at the style of Pattee:
* sense neurons produce a codified state having observed an object
* other neurons interpret that codified state and use them for control
* the codified state has no meaning apart from what the system interprets of it — Malcolm Lett

That's not it.

But look, if your interest is genuine, then stick with Pattee.

I think I said that I did all the neurobiology, human evolution, and philosophy of mind stuff first. I was even across all the computer science and complexity theory.

But hooking up with Pattee and his circle of theoretical biologists was when everything fully clicked into place. They had a mathematical understanding of biology as an information system. A clarity.

I'm not actually sure where the problem is here. I see the two as complimentary. As I have stated in my paper, the overall problem can be seen from multiple complimentary views: mechanistic/computational view ("logical" in my paper), and biological ("physical" in my paper). — Malcolm Lett

In some sense, the machinery is complementary to the physics. But that is what biosemiosis is about - the exact nature of that fundamental relationship.

So it is not just about having "two views" of the phenomenon - "pick whichever, and two is better than one, right?"

My claim here is that the only foundationally correct approach would be - broadly - biosemiotic. Both life and mind are about informational constraints imposed on dynamical instability. Organisms exist because they can regulate the physics of their environment in ways that produce "a stable self".

And (Turing) computation starts out on the wrong foot because it doesn't begin with any of that.

I admit I only skimmed the intro stuff. But it's all familiar material to me. So I will plunge in with my immediate reaction - apologies for the blunt response.

I see two instant failings.

The first is to treat consciousness as the product of "brain machinery". No matter how much you talk about neural nets or feedback loops, it just sets you on the wrong path. Consciousness can only start to make sense - scientifically - when approached in terms of biological and ecological realism.

Life is a non-mechanical phenomenon. It is not a form of computation, but fundamentally about the dissipation of entropy. A nervous system has that job to do. That is the foundation from which a scientific account has to build its way up. So if you don't start with the correct view of the biology, you can't arrive at a correct view of the neurobiology.

The second key criticism is that "consciousness" as you are talking about it here also conflates a biological level of awareness - that which all large brained animals would share due to the great similarity of their neurobiology - with the language-enhanced mentality of Homo sapiens.

We are very different as we evolved a capacity for syntactic speech. And that new level of semiosis is what allows a socially-constructed sense of self-awareness.

In short, animals are extrospective - "trapped in the present". They can't introspect. There is no inner world in the sense we understand it where we consider our "selves" to be in charge and "experiencing the experiences".

Speech is what transforms humans so that we have a rational self-regulation of our emotions, a narrative and autobiographical structure to our memories, a sense of personal identity, an ability to imagine and daydream in "off-line" fashion rather than being tied to a simple anticipatory form of forward planning and mental expectation.

So any scientific "theory of consciousness" has to be grounded in biological explanations with ecological validity. That is, it would have to be a scaled up version of a story in which the nervous system exists for the simple evolutionary purpose of dissipating entropy. And doing that involves being able to apply biological information to stabilise physico-chemical uncertainty.

Computers are founded on stable stuff. Biology is founded on the ability to stabilise stuff - channel metabolic processes in desired directions, rebuild bodies that are continually falling apart, reduced the uncertainty of the world in terms of a state of experience being produced by a brain.

And then language and culture make all the difference to the quality of human consciousness. There is this whole overlay of thought habits that we learn. Any theory of consciousness as a biological phenomenon has to also simplify its target by stripping out the psychological extras that complicate the socially-constructed mentality of us humans.

Then as to the actual computational model you have advanced, I didn't spot anything that seemed new or different even for that "cognitive flow chart" style of theorising.

As you say, there isn't some step that magically turns a bunch of information processing into a vivid state of experience - the step that jumps the explanatory gap. But that is what this style of theorising either has to achieve, or recognise that its lack of biological realism is why in fact it winds up creating a vast and unbridgable gap.

Your problem is that you can add all the mechanistic detail you want, but it never starts to come together in a way that says "this machine is conscious". Whereas a biological/ecological explanation can start off saying the whole deal is about a "biosemiotic" self~world modelling relation.

That is how theoretical biology would explain "life" in the most general fashion - the semiotic ability of genes and other biological information to regulate the underpinning physical processes that build living bodies that fit actual environments. And then neurosemiosis follows on quite naturally as a further level of organismic "reality modelling" for the purposes of metabolic homeostasis.

That is all brains have to do - see how to construct a stable world for ourselves in terms of achieving our basic ecological goals.

Once you start talking about logic or thought monitoring, you have skipped over the vast chunk of the embodied facts of psychology. And even worse, you are calling them "unconscious" or "automatic". You are saying there is information processing that is just information processing - the neural network level. And then somehow - by adding levels and levels - you suddenly get information processing that is "conscious".

A computational approach builds in this basic problem. A neurobiological approach never starts with it.

So the question is why you would even pursue a mechanistic theory in this day and age? Why would you not root your theory in biology?

Apologies again. But you did ask for a response.

But maths treats infinity as a "discrete" whole. You have infinities of many different "sizes".

Everyone complains this is paradoxical. However really it only shows that you can't escape the need for the dialectic of the discrete and the continuous. The relation between two opposing extremes is the irreducible fact.

It's interesting that you say that the continuous and discrete measure each other though — Gregory

They are reciprocal. A lack of one is the measure of the presence of the other.

So, in a sense, whichever block of water that comes 'there' becomes discrete because that gap has an origin and a 'history' of discreteness. — SaugB

But the very idea of this gap involves an interval. The hole is not a dimensionless point. It is a continuous length of river bed itself.

So again, the discrete and the continuous are concepts that are opposed in a relative sense. Neither is primary. They are each needed as the measure of the "other". The contrast boils down to that between the shortest imaginable interval vs the longest imaginable interval. The infinitesimal vs the infinite.

Since all flow can be shifted, but all discrete marks are permanent, as an analytic tool at least, discreteness is more reliable than continuity. — SaugB

Don’t flows wash away discrete marks? How do you mark the surface of a river?

One can only go so far as to assume for the sake of some function one wants to do that the discrete marks are not relevant, but they are never any less real, in my example. — SaugB

So all you are saying that a continuum only makes sense to us if we can imagine stepping along it in discrete steps.

That is my point. We can’t really imagine (or measure) the one without the other. So rather than focus on the apparent contradiction, appreciate the fundamental mutuality of the metaphysical dichotomy which is the discrete~continuous.

The rest is indiscernible from waffle. — Banno

You are positing a... something... between your discernment and the waffle? Curious.

Sounds like a modelling relation with reality - indirect realism - to me. The “something” that is the irreduciblilty of a relation where reality might be spoken of in terms of all it counterfactually ain’t.

However, even the really good posters, you will have a great time agreeing with but will you ever actually add to their knowledge or change their opinions on something? — Judaka

I’ll tell you what I find to be a productive habit of thought. I will defend an idea to the death while someone is disagreeing with it. But as soon as they start agreeing, then I start doubting it myself.

Belief should be constantly tested. So either you want others to be testing it for you. Or you have to switch to testing your own certitudes.

That can lead to strange dynamics on a forum if the reasons for seeking constant disagreement rather than settling for cosy agreement (even with one’s self) are not understood.

Sure. But you can't generally insert male into female starting in the middle, only in this case you can by modifying the shape of the receiving object so that a cross-section from the middle is now the mouth. — Srap Tasmaner

To extract a principle here, I would note how this method involves a reduction in dimensionality. An abstraction that results from taking a step back from the concrete particulars of the reality.

So you problematic is a foot - a surface that offers friction generally and also has a geometry with a particularly high friction kink at the ankle.

You can solve this problem in friction-minimising manner by turning the sock from being a cylinder into a circle. You abstract away a dimension and now the resulting circle glides over the kink at the ankle. A tube bunched into a circle can’t even see the kink exists.

So reasoning in general relies on abstraction - a dimensional reduction - to allow it to glide more easily over the rough surface of actual reality.

In sum, if nature was continuous, or a flow, I would have gotten the sense of its continuity even if I observed it now, and then ten years from now, and then twenty years from now, if continuity was really its independent nature. — SaugB

Nature is contrast. So it is both continuous and discrete ... these two ideal states describing the limits towards which it can tend, but never fully reach as “independent” states.

Continuity as a contrasting concept depends on discreteness in the sense that it is a measurable lack of sharp breaks. While discreteness depends likewise on a relative lack of continuity. The two limits are thus mutually dependent and neither could have had independent, stand alone, identity.

If your concern is more physical than metaphysical, then you might profit from reading Into The Cool, by Dorian Sagan. It analyzes how the natural laws of Thermodynamics cause all change in the world. On the macro scale, Energy Flow seems to be continuous, but in our imagination we can zoom-in to look at smaller & smaller pieces of that fluid process. At the very bottom limit of our mechanically-assisted perception though, that flowing stream of causation begins to break-down into the physical bits we call "quanta". At that point, philosophers will ask if reality is inherently continuous or discontinuous. This may sound disingenuous, but I think it's BothAnd. — Gnomon

:up: Top book.

You might like Stan Salthe’s more technical treatment in his two hierarchy theory books.

On the discrete vs continuous issue, he highlights how we can imagine reality as being composed in hierarchical fashion by levels of “cogency”.

So all entities in reality are regarded as differing scales of an integrative process. Some act of thermalisation which achieves the stability of reaching a statistical equilibrium (where micro change persists, but that changing doesn’t make a macro state difference).

A molecule might be an example of such stability. The atoms still jitter, but are sufficiently bound so that the molecule form a stable level of entification.

Now the point is that reality builds up as levels of such complexity. So say we are focused on the River Thames as our focal level of interest. That is the scale of entification we seek to understand. We then need to look to the lower and higher scales of being in which our focal scale is embedded.

These will form boundary conditions - an appearance of continuity - while also being themselves composed of discrete entities (remembering that entities are self organised coherent processes, not “things”).

So the Thames is composed of a flow of water molecules. At that scale, it is a collection of discrete entities. But for the river itself, the water blurs into the continuity of a fluid flow. If you look downwards form the scale of the river, you see just the emergent macro property which is H2O being watery. The spatiotemporal scale of the molecular action is so fast in terms of its integration that none of that internal dynamics is apparent from the distance at which we want to describe the dynamics of a river.

So looking downwards, the dynamics blur into a generality, a continuity, that covers over the detail.

Then looking upwards to the larger scale of spatiotemporal integration, the River Thames is embedded in the much greater “cogent moment” that is geological time and its punctate events. Plate tectonics is shifting the earth’s crust about to ease thermodynamic pressures. The climate is changing over lond cycles.

So the Thames exists as a stable solution to a hydrodynamic problem set by a landscape during some particular era. From the point of view in which we see the Thames as a stable entity, this is possible because those larger thermodynamic flows in which it is embedded are so large in scale that now a single whole moment fills our vision. We can’t see how the landscape was once very different, and how eventually it will be very difference again, as the earth’s crust continues to convulse and erode.

Look upwards and the big changes aren’t visible. We are inside the continuity of some very large event. Look downwards and the small changes aren’t visible. We see only the continuity of their collective behaviour.

So hierarchy theory gives a natural account of how it is BothAnd.

Nah. You’re just demonstrating you know fuck all about physics again. And you have a weak bladder. :hearts:

It's curious, butI remain unconvinced. — Banno

As if you have ever checked out the maths of the Planck constants and understood their reciprocal relations. :lol:

It’s Saturday morning. Time for Banno to run around piddling on lampposts, marking his territory.

That was pretty good for 95. — Ansiktsburk

It’s funny reading. I’m now reminded of the Usenet groups of that time. And they were mostly drivel as the page says....

Most of these newsgroups are misserable and frequently raged by flame wars.

The sci.philosophy.tech, sci.philosophy meta and talk.philosophy.misc newsgroups excel in layman's opinions, prejudices and other drivel. At regular times you'll find posts of people who think they've found the truth. Quite often the truth is a thesis of which undergraduates in philosophy know the refutations at the back of their hand. Other favourite topics are the existence of God, the meaning of life and propoposals for a theory of everything.

Every now and then you may find informed discussion of philosophy of mind and language at comp.ai.philosophy

Then back when “a browser” needed explaining....

WWW is a world wide system of hyperlinked texts. Hyperlinked means that the system allows you to jump from one text to another (not necessarily on the same computer) by activating marked (highlighted) phrases in a certain text.

To access the Web you need a special WWW-client, a so-called "browser". The browser allows you to read documents on the Web.

Most browsers also provide an interface to other parts of the net, like gopher, ftp, usenet, and an ever-increasing range of other systems. In addition, the browser will permit database searches.

This one? — Wayfarer

That looks like the 20th anniversary greatest hits version.

I found a snapshot of philosophy sites in 1995...
https://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/LocalFile/PhiloServ.html

Psyche-D and Peirce-L are a couple of listservs I was on. Talk.origins was another site. So I must have started in 1994. Psyche-D came out of the first Tucson “Towards a Science of Consciousness” conference.

This was the UK, so proper internet and email arrived around 1996. I tried bulletin boards earlier, but not the same thing.

The forums were actually email based. But you could browse the logs. I’m not sure. It all seems so far away and hazy now. And usage was metered so you had to get on and off with messages downloaded before you racked up a bill.

I'm jealous, the early internet seemed like a pretty cool place. — darthbarracuda

It was revolutionary feeling. Woodstock for academia.

It was like one year I was down at the British Library - sometimes sitting in Marx's old research seat - waiting the three days(!!!) it took for obscure books to be retrieved from store and have them brought to me on a clanking tea trolley.

The next it was daily chatter with the biggest names in the business (so far as my research interests went). Papers would reach you months and even years ahead of publication. Any one would talk to anyone.

That lasted about a decade. Then some fool invented blogging. And kids could afford computers. The discussion boards evaporated or became narrowly focused again.

it’s still the least bad I’ve found on the internet. — Pfhorrest

:lol:

There was a golden age of internet forums back when only academics had computers and modem access. Every contribution was high quality.

Well, I say that. But academics are just as prone to bitch-fests.

One discussion board owner got so angry with the way the community was "derailing" his own preferred take on complexity studies that he shut down several years of debate and tens of thousands of posts without warning. Just wiped it.

So we are always stuck with the "least bad" I guess. :up:

So what is the first bolded thing that link says? "There are two fundamentally important functions of bile in all species...".

The analysis in terms of causes is, "Well, let's start by highlighting the purposes of digestion as a process....".

Now, why isn't there a similar link for "how do brains produce consciousness?" — RogueAI

Because asking a question along the lines of "how does the liver produce bile?" is quite different to the larger question of asking "why does digestion as a functional process result in bile production?".

And you don't seem to understand that difference.

Also: you seem to assume brains exist. Do you assume that? — RogueAI

Why would I not assume that? Do you have evidence to the contrary. :chin:

Now, repalce a few words: "What do biologists say is the causal mechanism for how livers produce bile"? That can be asked and answered. — RogueAI

So answer it. Let's see how that goes. Let's see what you leave out in terms of the full "four causes" model of systems causality that Aristotle first identified and modern systems science refines.

And there's an implicit assumption in your response that brains exist. They might, they might not. — RogueAI

Yeah. I mean why do we need to consider anything that these crazy neuroscientists might be saying about those "brain" thingys? That's just one of their unwarranted assumptions. The idea that brains exist. :roll:

I don't assume materialism/physicalism to be the case. Why do you and what warrants that assumption? — RogueAI

I just carefully explained how "the physical world" is actually a semiotic construct. The umwelt is internal to the modelling. We don't have direct access to the Kantian "thing in itself".

So I assume nothing in that regard. In just the same way I don't take an idealist notion of "the mind" for granted either. The modelling relations story challenges both so as to cut deeper.

What do neurobiology and psychology say is the causal mechanism for how brains produce consciousness? — RogueAI

Again, they would say if you ask the question that way, it already locks in the wrong perspective.

Is causality a "mechanism" as such? Would an organ "produce" an "effect"? Is consciousness the effect of a mechanical cause? Is consciousness even a thing?

So it is true that we are trained to think of the world in terms of machine-like cause and effect - Newton's impressed forces, or a finite state automaton like a clock or computer.

That works when we want to describe - or build - very simple things. Like physical machines. Or computing machines.

But a biologist is concerned with "machines" that are irreducibly complex. It's a whole different ballgame in terms of its causality.

So a big part of the answer is just learn to accept that causality itself is a concept that needs proper revision to make sense of biology, and thus neurobiology and psychology. You have to understand the world in terms of a complex adaptive systems' causality. A holistic approach instead of a reductionist approach (where consciousness is being reduced to some kind of psychic substance or material property.)

And then the kind of answer you get at the other end is that consciousness is what it feels like for the organism and its nervous system to be in an active modelling relation with the world.

The brain is interpreting sensory signs and making some kind of map of reality so that it can navigate it in practical ways for survival purposes. That is the guts of the causality. The act of interpreting the world as some set of signs which then coordinate our actions.

And if that is happening - with "us" as the point of view that stands in opposition to "the world being experienced" - then why wouldn't it feel like something? The causal question can be inverted.

The issue is the reverse one of having to provide some good reason why a running model of the world in our heads shouldn't feel exactly like having a running model of the world in our heads. Is there something particular you can point to that would cause that not to be the case?

The more you understand about neurobiology especially, the more you can see of the way the brain constructs its reality model. And the more you are then moved to ask what else could be the result than that we seem to have this movie of the world - a movie with "us" in it as the active agent - running through our heads?

And also, we will begin to appreciate that this "movie" is in no way a literal representation of the world either. It is constructed of signs we employ.

Light doesn't come in different colours, only different wavelengths. Organic molecules aren't sweet or bitter, that is just a response we construct by the way identifying corners of a molecule latch on to some receptor cell.

The world we experience is thus a "semiotic umwelt" - a model of the world with us in it.

Jakob von Uexküll coined the term and tried to illustrate it in terms of the "conscious experience" of a honey bee. On the left, the world as it "objectively" is - full of unnecessary detail. On the right, the world seen by the bee in terms which give it agency within a meaningful subjective model (given its job is to find flowers with nectar in the confusion of a meadow).

....do quality educated people exist anywhere in the world? — JerseyFlight

I asked what would be your criteria? That’s pretty vague. And the context provided by your OP suggested you hadn’t thought about the matter with sufficient depth to give a useful answer.

Generally all your replies in this thread have been irrational and emotional. So you can try one last time to remedy this fault.

Another sentence that doesn’t mean anything. :kiss:

I have no interest in evading my burden of proof. I am not trying to play a posture game. I just want to seek out truth, my motivation is not to be right. You raised many points and some of them may indeed stand to correct my position. I would only be grateful for it. — JerseyFlight

This is just an empty assertion, with no particular content. :cool:

Suppose I was talking about freedom in a time of slave plantations, and you went off on an abstract rant about "whose interests [would this freedom serve] would you be wanting to impose some universal system of freedom?" — JerseyFlight

The question would be what interest was being served? That purpose would explain why some interest group might take one view rather than another.

And my general position would be to ask whether some universal system of freedom could even be the case. What would it look like if it was to meet all possible purposes of a variety of interest groups?

I would expect some universal story could be extracted. But I wouldn’t already presume it aligned with what suits me personally.

Just like you would be telling me I was wrong to speak of freedom back then, you are telling me that I am wrong to speak of education now. — JerseyFlight

I’ve said nothing of the sort of course.

I hold my tongue, but you are seriously a despicable intellectual. — JerseyFlight

That’s not holding your tongue. :rofl:

Your position, in order to qualify as a refutation of my position, — JerseyFlight

We’ve established that you have no particular position. There is nothing substantial as yet to be refuted. Only multiple question marks you haven’t addressed.

You are now engaged in Ad Hominems. Please answer my questions. — JerseyFlight

You are now continuing with your evasions. Please start answering my questions.

You are smart enough to know that when you answer my questions you will end up validating the very category you tried to deny, which then provides the premise from which to deduce my position. — JerseyFlight

All I'm seeing on your end is either a trail of evasion or a constant failure to comprehend. So it is rich that you demand "answers" to questions you don't even seem clear about yourself.

Maybe someone else thinks you are making some kind of sense and will chip in with the replies you feel you need.

But in the end, what are we to make of "arguments" that go like this?....

For example, it is unlikely that a child growing up in the tragedy and violence of Syria, is going to have advanced knowledge in philosophy or science, let alone even much awareness of itself or the world. — JerseyFlight

Sure, bombs don't advance civilisation. At least for those bombed.

And yet bombs also drive civilisation's scientific advances.

Go figure.

Or instead, just steer a wide berth around anything that might actually challenge this kind of false equivalency.

...not driven by defense mechanism or insecure rigidity. — JerseyFlight

So we need to be stable but plastic, clever but wise, young but old, etc.

If you believe in dialectics, then a balance of oppositions is implied. And yet we don't want to be too balanced either!

By narrowed, you mean give my objections a wide berth?

I've already said I have my ideas about an ideal education. My parents applied them to me. I applied them to my kids. No one has any complaints.

But my point remains that what is "ideal" has to be plugged into what is "pragmatic", at least if we are talking about everyone on this crowded planet of ours.

Does everyone benefit from an "education"? If we are talking about reaching a post-doc level of comprehension, doesn't that just leave 99% of the population feeling "dumb".

If we are talking about having the most possible people fit to have happy lives, that feels like a very different social investment.

Reading your posts, one can only speculate where you sit on such concrete details.

And yet you are the one complaining my approach is too broad? :chin:

That true. Platonic duality was the original theory welded on to Christianity. Descartes was trying to make things work while allowing for a post-Aristotelean materialism that had made even animals a flesh and blood machinery.

Yes. I mean dualism can't be completely eliminated as culturally that is just how we talk about things. It is a myth we live by. We learn to regards ourselves as individual "minds". And that is essential to living in a modern society where it is the basis of the collective game.

We take personal responsibility for our actions - whether we act out of attention or habit. We behave as if freewill is a thing and not just the skill of balancing the personal against the communal in our choices of actions.

So once you build a culture around dualism - as Christianity did in the Western tradition - then you are stuck with that as the way people are expected to frame their understandings of how it works.

It really gets in the way of the science. That's a reason why, within neurobiology, it was pretty much banned as a term to be using. You talked instead of voluntary vs involuntary behaviour, or other terms that targeted something clearly functional, such as attentional and habit levels of processing.

Out of curiosity what are the competing thoeries on conciousness now? — AJ88

It is probably safer to say that if you are asking the question of “what is consciousness?”, you are already making a rookie mistake. Most of the “theories” are chasing the explanatory phantoms left by Cartesian dualism.

But studying neurobiology and psychology gives you a good sense of how brains actually model worlds. And the logic of that can be found in systems theories.

Yep. So it isn’t the ideal vs the materialistic. A pragmatic dialectic would stress these two things must be complementary.

They have to be the two aspects of the functioning whole.

A problem with Marxism is that it was Romantically unbalanced. It presumed everyone would play nice if everything was communally owned.

But that isn’t a natural dynamic as Nature shows. Systems are built on the productive mix of competitive and cooperative behaviours.

So when it comes to education, it has to be complementary to the means of production. That. Is the general rule.

But then we can step back to critique the kind of society that results. Or also, the possibility that a society has an education pulling in one direction while its material economy is driving in another.